App maps the decline in regional diversity of English dialects - Phys.org

App maps the decline in regional diversity
of English dialects
26 May 2016

                                                      feature which was once normal throughout the West
                                                       Country and along much of the south coast – are
                                                       disappearing in favour of the pronunciations found
                                                       in London and the South-East.

Regional diversity in dialect words and
pronunciations could be diminishing as much of
England falls more in line with how English is
spoken in London and the south-east, according to
the first results from a free app developed by
Cambridge researchers.                               Lead researcher Dr Adrian Leemann, from
                                                     Cambridge's Department of Theoretical and
The English Dialects App (free for Android and       Applied Linguistics, said: "When it comes to
iOS) was launched in January 2016 and has been language change in England, our results confirm
downloaded more than 70,000 times. To date,          that there is a clear pattern of levelling towards the
more than 30,000 people from over 4,000 locations English of the south-east; more and more people
around the UK have provided results on how           are using and pronouncing words in the way that
certain words and colloquialisms are pronounced. people from London and the south-east do.
A new, updated version of the app – which
attempts to guess where you're from at the end of Professor David Britain from the University of Bern
the quiz – is available for download from this week. added: "People in Bristol speak much more
                                                     similarly to those in Colchester now than they did
Based on the huge new dataset of results,            fifty years ago. Regional differences are
researchers at Cambridge, along with colleagues      disappearing, some quite quickly. However, while
at the universities of Bern and Zurich, have been    many pockets of resistance to this levelling are
able to map the spread, evolution or decline of      shrinking, there is still a stark north-south divide in
certain words and colloquialisms compared to         the pronunciation of certain key words."
results from the original survey of dialect speakers
in 313 localities carried out in the 1950s.          Dialect words are even more likely to have
                                                     disappeared than regional accents, according to
One of the major findings is that some features of this research. Once, the word 'backend' instead of
regional accents, such as pronouncing the 'r' in     'autumn' was common in much of England, but
words like 'arm' – a very noticeable pronunciation today very few people report using this word.

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However, the research has shown some areas of            responses supplied by the public, suggests that
resistance to the patterns of overall levelling in        greater geographical mobility is behind the changes
dialect. Newcastle and Sunderland stood out from          when compared to the first systematic nationwide
the rest of England with the majority of people from      investigation of regional speech, the Survey of
those areas continuing to use local words and             English Dialects from the 1950s.
pronunciations which are declining elsewhere. For
example, many people in the North-East still use a       "There has been much greater geographical
traditional dialect word for 'a small piece of wood      mobility in the last half century," said Blaxter. "Many
stuck under the skin', 'spelk' instead of Standard       people move around much more for education,
English 'splinter'.                                      work and lifestyle and there has been a significant
                                                         shift of population out of the cities and into the
Other dialect words, like 'shiver' for 'splinter', are   countryside.
still reported in exactly the same area they were
found historically—although they are far less
common than they once were (see map slideshow).

                                                       "Many of the results have confirmed what language
                                                       experts might predict – but until now we just didn't
                                                       have the geographical breadth of data to back up
                                                       our predictions. If we were to do the survey in
The data collected to date shows that one northern another 60-70 years we might well see this dialect
pronunciation has proved especially robust: saying levelling expanding further, although some places
words like 'last' with a short vowel instead of a long like the north-east seem to have been especially
one. In this case, the northern form actually          good at preserving certain colloquialisms and
appears to have spread southwards in the Midlands pronunciations."
and the West Country compared with the historical
survey.                                                When the app was originally launched in January,
                                                       users were quizzed about the way they spoke 26
In other cases, new pronunciations were found to different words or phrases. The academics behind
be spreading. Pronouncing words like 'three' with      the app wanted to see how English dialects have
an 'f' was only found in a tiny region in the south    changed, spread or levelled out since the Survey of
east in the 1950s, but the data from today show this English Dialects. The 1950s project took eleven
pronunciation is much more widespread – 15% of years to complete and captured the accents and
respondents reported saying 'free' for 'three', up     dialects of mainly farm labourers.
from just 2% in the old Atlas.
                                                       Perhaps one of the most surprising results of the
Cambridge PhD student Tam Blaxter, who worked data provided so far is how the use of 'scone' (to
alongside Dr Leemann to map the 30,000                 rhyme with 'gone' rather than 'cone') is much more

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common in the north of England that many might
 imagine (see map slideshow).

                                                      More information: Download the App from the
                                                    App Store: itunes.apple.com/us/app/englis …
Adrian Leemann said: "Everyone has strong views &mt=8&ign-mpt=uo%3D8
about how this word is pronounced but until we
launched the app in January, we knew rather little   Download the App from Google Play:
about who uses which pronunciation and where.       play.google.com/store/apps/det …
Our data shows that for the North and Scotland,     ls?id=ch.uk_regional
'scone' rhymes with 'gone', for Cornwall and the
area around Sheffield it rhymes with 'cone' – while
for the rest of England, there seems to be a lot of
community-internal variation. In the future we will   Provided by University of Cambridge
further unpick how this distribution is conditioned
socially."

The launch of the English Dialects App in January
has also allowed language use in Wales, Scotland
and Northern Ireland to be compared with language
use in England (the original 1950s survey was
limited to England and similar surveys of the other
parts of the UK were not undertaken at the same
time or using the same methods).

The huge levels of feedback have also meant the
team have improved the prediction of where users
might be from. The app now correctly places 25 per
cent of respondents within 20 miles, compared with
37 miles for the old method.

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APA citation: App maps the decline in regional diversity of English dialects (2016, May 26) retrieved 25
                                   April 2019 from https://phys.org/news/2016-05-app-decline-regional-diversity-english.html

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